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The Soviet Program for Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Explosions

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The Soviet Program for Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Explosions UCRL-ID-124410 The Soviet Program for Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Explosions Milo D. Nordyke -•.'iiCE/VED OCT 2 8 ms OSTJ July 24,1996 This is an informal report intended primarily for internal or limited external distribution. The opinions and conclusions stated are those of the author and may or may not be those of the Laboratory. Work performed under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Energy by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory under Contract W-7405-ENG-48. DISTRIBUTION OF THIS DOCUMENT IS UNLIMITED DISCLAIMER This document was prepared as an account of work sponsored by an agency of the United States Government Neither the United States Government nor the University of California nor any of their employees, makes any warranty, express or implied, or assumes any legal liability or responsibility for the accuracy, completeness, or usefulness of any information, apparatus, product, or process disclosed, or represents that its use would not infringe privately owned rights. Reference herein to any specific commercial product, process, or service by trade name, trademark, manufacturer, or otherwise, does not necessarily constitute or imply its endorsement, recommendation, or favoring by the United States Government or the University of California. The views and opinions of authors expressed herein do not necessarily state or reflect those of the United States Government or the University of California, and shall not be used for advertising or product endorsement purposes. This report has been reproduced directly from the best available copy. Available to DOE and DOE contractors from the Office of Scientific and Technical Information P.O. Box 62, Oak Ridge, TN 37831 Prices available from (615) 576-8401, FTS 626-8401 Available to the public from the National Technical Information Service U.S. Department of Commerce 5285 Port Royal Rd., Springfield, VA 22161 DISCLAIMER Portions of this document may be illegible in electronic image products. Images are produced from the best available original document The Soviet Program fee Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Explosions Mik> D. Nordyke (July 24,1996) L Early History The concept of utilizing the weapons of war to serve the peaceful pursuits of mankind is as old as civilization itself. Perhaps the most famous reference to this basic desire is recorded in the Book of Micah where the great prophet Isiah called upon his people "to turn your spears into pitchforks and your swords into plowshares." As the scientists at Los Alamos worked on developing the world's first atomic bomb, thoughts of how this tremendous new source of energy could be used for peaceful purposes generally focused on using the thermal energy generated by the slow fission of uranium in a reactor, such as those being used to produce plutonium, to drive electric power stations. However, being scientists in a new, exciting field, it was impossible to avoid letting their minds wander from the task at hand to other scientific or non-military uses for the bombs themselves. During the Manhattan Project, Otto Frisch, one of the pioneers in the development of nuclear fission process in the 1930s, first suggested using an atomic explosion as a source for a large quantities of neutrons which could used in scientific experiments designed to expand their understanding of nuclear physics. After the war was over, many grandiose ideas appeared in the popular press on how this new source of energy should be harnessed to serve mankind. Not to be left out of the growing enthusiasm for peaceful uses of atomic energy, the Soviet Union added their visions to the public record. In November 1949, shortly after the test of their first nuclear device on September 23 1949, Andrei Vishinsky, the Soviet representative to the UN, delivered a statement justifying their efforts to develop their own nuclear weapons capability. In poetic but somewhat overblown rhetoric he said: "the Soviet Union did not use atomic energy for the purpose of accumulating stockpiles of atomic bombs, it was using atomic energy for purposes of its own domestic economy: blowing up mountains, changing the course of rivers, irrigating deserts, charting new paths of life in regions untrodden by human foot"* A few years later, a Russian engineer, Professor G. I. Pokrovskii wrote: 1 United Nations General Assembly Official Records: Fourth Session. Ad Hoc Political Thirty-Third Meeting. November 10,1949, p. 188. ''progressive science claims that it is possible to utilize the noble force of the explosions builder for peaceful purposes....With the help of directional explosions one can straighten out the beds of large rivers...construct gigantic dams....cut canals.....Indeed, the perspectives disrlflfifd due to the new atomic energy are unlimited. However, very few of the articles written in the late 40s and early SOs had concrete ideas on how the explosive force of the bombs themselves could be used for scientific purposes or to transform the landscape and alter the character of geological formations deep under the earth. One of the first was written by Fred Reines, a young physicist who had come to Los Alamos in 1944 to work on the nuclear weapons program. In June of 19S0, he wrote a short article for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists examining the possibilities of using atomic explosives for a few large-scale earth-moving applications such as making canals, mining, breaking up icebergs and melting the polar icecap. In general, his outlook was rather pessimistic, concluding that "such uses appear at best to be extremely limited in scope, owing to the radioactivity hazard associated with atomic explosions."^ With the development of thermonuclear devices, new ideas began to ferment in the minds of the bomb-designers. Thermonuclear devices still required a small fission trigger but, since the thermonuclear fuel consisted of relatively cheap deuterium and lithium and produced almost no long-lived radioactive by-products, they offered the possibility of an order of magnitude decrease in both the cost of an explosive and the amount of radioactivity associated with a given total yield. The detonation by the Soviet Union of their first thermonuclear explosion on August 12, 1953 led President Eisenhower to the determination that he needed to take the initiative in dealing with the political aspects of the nuclear arms race. Toward this end, on December 8, 1953 President Eisenhower delivered his now-famous Atoms for Peace speech at the U.N. calling for "...more than the mere reduction or elimination of atomic materials for military purposes. It is not enough to take this weapon out of the hands of their soldiers. It must be put into the hands of those who will know how to strip its military casing and adapt it to the arts of peace...this greatest of destructive forces can be developed into a great boon for the benefit Who can doubt, it the entire body of the world's scientists and engineers had adequate amounts of fissionable material with which to test and develop their ideas, that this capability would rapidly be transformed into universal, efficient, and economic usage." This dramatic and stirring call to the world community to begin the process of applying this powerful new source of energy to the peaceful uses of mankind served as a powerful stimulant within the nuclear physics community and nuclear power 2 G. I. Pokrovskii, R*».pin«iTig of an Fra nf Atnmiq FTif»royr Tekhnika Molodezhi, 9,1954. 3 Frederick Reines. Are There PgfliCSfoi FiflPneer*nff Uses o,f At°THJC. Explosives?. Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, June, 1950, p. 171-2. industry. Following up Eisenhower's Atoms for Peace speech, in early 1954 the U.S. proposed that the U.N. sponsor a Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy. The first of four such conferences was ultimately was held in Geneva, Switzerland in August of 19SS. It was the largest scientific meeting in the world held up to that time with over 2500 participants in attendance; over 1000 technical papers were presented. For many Soviet scientists, it was their first opportunity to attend a scientific meeting outside the Soviet Union and to meet their colleagues from the West4 While there were no papers presented at the Geneva Conference on the peaceful uses of nuclear explosions, the general enthusiasm for the integration of peaceful uses of nuclear energy into the fabric of society and the declassification of a broad spectrum of information about the attributes and effects of nuclear fission processes gave rise to an increasing interest in such ideas, particularly within the nuclear weapons community. Fired by this enthusiasm, in the Spring of 1956 a French scientist Camille Rougeron wrote a monograph conjuring up images of a wide variety of applications for such explosions - building dams, changing the course of rivers, melting glaciers, breaking-up ice jams, changing the climate, constructing underground power plants driven by the heat of thermonuclear explosions, and breaking rock for mining.5 Rougeron's "dreams" added little in the way of quantitative analysis of such applications, but they did serve to raise the expectation of the general public for some peaceful benefit from the nuclear tests being fired in the Pacific and at the Nevada Test Site. At about the same time, the Soviet engineer G. I. Pokrovskii again wrote of his vision of using compact, powerful, low cost of nuclear explosives for removing overburden from valuable ore deposits or excavating canals: "With the data now available, we can say that radioactive contamination in a nuclear explosion should not be considered an insurmountable obstacle to the use of such explosives in mining and construction. On the basis of the many advantages of nuclear explosions, we conclude that the time is ripe to begin actual experiments in this field."6 II.
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